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Exciting Home based Consultancy Opportunity: Work at UNICEF as a Research Analyst Consultant, Apply Now!

Ednah Carrick May 2, 2026

0 751 3 minutes read

Closing Date: 7 May 2026

Exciting Home based Consultancy Opportunity: Work at UNICEF as a Research Analyst Consultant, Apply Now!

Overview

UNICEF works in over 190 countries and territories to save children’s lives, defend their rights, and help them fulfill their potential, from early childhood through adolescence.

UNICEF is committed, passionate, and proud of what they do for as long as they are needed. Promoting the rights of every child is not just a job – it is a calling.

UNICEF is a place where careers are built. UNICEF offers its staff diverse opportunities for professional and personal development that will help them reinforce a sense of purpose while serving children and communities across the world. UNICEF welcomes everyone who wants to belong and grow in a diverse and passionate culture, coupled with an attractive compensation and benefits package.

Terms of Reference

The purpose of this home based consultancy is to provide technical analytical support to the Urban Poverty study in the United Republic of Tanzania and produce a working paper for publication and a policy brief for advocacy. Background UNICEF Office of Strategy and Evidence – Innocenti (UNICEF Innocenti) and UNICEF Tanzania Country Office (TCO) are collaborating to generate high-quality, policy-relevant evidence on urban poverty and deprivation in Tanzania. The collaboration aims to produce a peer-reviewed working paper and a policy brief that will inform UNICEF advocacy, programme design, and resource mobilization in support of urban social protection, targeting, and inclusive urban development.

Rapid urbanization in Tanzania has intensified spatial inequalities, particularly within large urban centres where informal settlements and localized deprivation are often masked by aggregate statistics. While recent global studies have produced micro-estimates of wealth and poverty, these models lack the spatial granularity required to map intra-urban disparities relevant for city-level planning and intervention. This research addresses that gap by developing an urban-focused, high-resolution poverty mapping approach, integrating geospatial data and machine-learning techniques.

The analysis will focus on six Tier-1 cities—Dar es Salaam, Mwanza, Arusha, Dodoma, Mbeya, and Zanzibar City—where the density of survey data enables robust model training and validation. Within this context, UNICEF Innocenti seeks to recruit a Research Analyst (Consultant) to provide technical and analytical support to the study, contributing directly to the processing of geospatial data, predictive modelling, analysis, and drafting of the working paper and the policy brief

If you would like to know more about this home based consultancy, please review the complete Terms of Reference here Download File TMC0001943 TOR.pdf

Research Analyst Consultant Minimum requirements:

Education: Master’s (or Higher) in Data Science, Spatial Econometrics, Geography, Computer Science, Economics, Statistics, Public Policy, or a related highly quantitative field
Work Experience: At least 3 years of relevant experience in quantitative research and advanced data analysis.
Demonstrated experience working with geospatial data and spatial analysis.
Practical, demonstrable experience building and tuning supervised machine learning models (e.g., Random Forest, XGBoost) and deep learning architectures (e.g., CNNs) for socio-economic or spatial analysis.
Skills: Expert-level proficiency in Python or R (mandatory for Google Earth Engine integration, CNN feature extraction, and ML pipelines) AND proficiency in Stata (mandatory for all survey data processing). The consultant must be able to deliver clean, reproducible Stata .do files for the survey integration phase, and clear Python/R scripts for the geospatial and machine learning phases.
Demonstrated experience with Google Earth Engine (GEE), standard GIS platforms (e.g. QGIS, ArcGIS), including the processing of multi-spectral remote sensing data (e.g. Sentinel-2, VIIRS) and vector data (e.g. OpenStreetMap).
Strong data visualization skills (e.g. generating continuous spatial heat maps) and a proven track record of analytical academic writing.
Language Requirements: Fluency in English (written and spoken) is required
Desirables: Familiarity with handling Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) or Living Standards Measurement Studies (LSMS), particularly experience in mitigating the spatial displacement (jittering) of GPS survey clusters.
Knowledge of United Republic of Tanzania’s urban landscape, social protection landscape and poverty profile
Relevant research experience working with UNICEF, other international organizations.
Ability to organize own work and to carry out a computationally heavy research project with limited supervision according to deadlines.